THE EDGE magazine | Book Reviews | Martin Limon

Jade Lady Burning
Martin Limon
Serpent's Tail Mask Noir paperback, 249 pages, £7.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

'In the Army, going after the truth is usually seen as a waste of time.'

If you like the title of Martin Limon's debut, you're half-way there. It's not subtle: there's a jade lady, and, yes, it's not long before she's found bound and barbecued.

She was Pak Ok-suk, a red-light 'business girl' in downtown Korea. The US Army assigns two youthful detectives to the case, fearing that one of their own is implicated. But trouble brews as Bascom and Sueno overturn far bigger stones than either the inscrutable local gangsters or duplicitous US Green Machine would like.

Twenty years in the service (including ten in Korea) give Limon the necessary background, but mere knowledge does not a great book make and, unlike poor Miss Pak, Jade Lady Burning never really catches fire.

When the inevitable revelations begin, they are neither revealing nor surprising enough. Nor, bizarrely, is it the detectives tenacity that finally brings the villains to justice: the solution is literally (and lazily) dropped right into their hands after a couple of hundred pages of colourful but inconclusive faffing about. If Limon was shooting for something resonant in the last few dozen pages, his compass is way off. Whatever Jade Lady Burning's conclusion might suggest, Chinatown it sadly ain't.

Still, given its location, the proposed film (from the makers of the shockingly bad Patriot Games) should at least look good. Which is just as well, because this is otherwise seriously insubstantial stuff. •

© THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.